The 4:15 Amtrak out of Chicago's Union Station smelled like burnt coffee and other people's ambitions.

Joanna Blake had been sitting in Car 7, Seat 22A - the window seat she'd specifically requested when she booked the ticket three weeks ago, back when going to Louisville for her parents' annual spring gathering had seemed like a perfectly reasonable idea - and she had been doing a very good job of not crying.

The trick, she'd learned over the past eleven days, was to look out the window and let her eyes go slightly unfocused. Let the city smear past in streaks of gray and glass. Don't let anything resolve into a specific shape. Don't look at couples. Don't look at her phone. Don't read the email again. Don't think about how the email had been sent at 6:43 in the morning on a Tuesday, which meant Derek had probably drafted it the night before, lying next to her, and she had noticed nothing - had, in fact, kissed his shoulder before she got out of bed to make his coffee, oblivious and easy and utterly, catastrophically wrong about everything.

The trick was working until the woman sat down in her seat.

"Oh - I'm so sorry, I think this is -" Joanna stopped. The woman was crying. Not politely, not discreetly. Her shoulders shook and her face was buried in her hands and she had clearly chosen this seat - Joanna's seat, 22A - because it was by the window, because the window was the right place to rest your forehead and feel the movement of the train carrying you away from whatever you were running from. Joanna recognized the logic immediately. She had been utilizing it herself.

The woman looked up, startled. She was young - mid-twenties, maybe - with dark hair and eyes that were red-rimmed and too large for the sorrow in them. She clutched her ticket and Joanna's ticket both, having knocked the latter off the seat when she sat down. "I'm so sorry," she said again. "I just - I needed the window."

"I know," Joanna said.

The train jolted into motion. They sat there for a moment, two women in the middle of their separate disasters, the platform sliding away behind them.

The young woman's name was Layla Nolan. She didn't offer the last name immediately - it came out later, somewhere around Indianapolis, when the two of them had established the particular intimacy that only forms between strangers on long-haul trains, strangers who have tacitly agreed not to ask questions and then find themselves asking all of them anyway. Layla was heading to Cedar Creek, Montana. She had a cousin there, she said, or almost a cousin - she'd grown up spending summers there, and it was the only place she could think of where the thing that was chasing her couldn't follow.

Joanna was heading to Louisville. Her parents. Her mother's careful, catastrophically well-meaning parade of "perfectly lovely men" she'd lined up for Joanna's visit, which her mother had been planning before the breakup but had redoubled in intensity after, as though the antidote to being destroyed by one man was to immediately audition replacements.

"Trade me," Joanna said.

Layla blinked.

"Your ticket for mine. I'll go to Cedar Creek. You go to Louisville." She paused. "My mother will love you. She likes people who need taking care of."

Layla looked at her for a long moment. Outside the window, Indiana was unspooling into flatness. "You don't know anyone in Cedar Creek."

"That's rather the point."

It was, she would later admit, an impulsive decision of the kind that her former, pre-Derek self would not have made. Her former self planned. Her former self operated on spreadsheets and contingency plans and the careful management of outcomes. Her former self had also spent three years building a life around a man who was apparently building a different life behind her back, so perhaps her former self's system had some fundamental design flaws worth revisiting.

They traded tickets at the next stop.

Layla pressed her hands briefly and said, "The Morrows are good people. If you get in trouble, ask for the Morrows."

"Which Morrows?"

"Any of them," Layla said. "There's really only one family that matters out there."

Then she was gone, and Joanna was on a train to Montana with one roller suitcase, her laptop, and no plan whatsoever. She pressed her forehead against the window and let the landscape blur.

She did not cry. She would not give Derek Sloane another tear on this train.

She gave him three somewhere around the Wyoming border, but she considered that a reasonable compromise.

Cedar Creek, Montana, turned out to be smaller than any place Joanna had ever seriously considered visiting.

She discovered this gradually, the way you discover most bad decisions - in increments, each revelation slightly worse than the last, each one arriving just after you've committed too fully to turn back. First: the Amtrak didn't actually stop in Cedar Creek. It stopped in Millhaven, which was seventeen miles east and served, according to the ancient hand-painted sign outside the station, as the region's "Gateway to the Big Sky Country," a claim Joanna found aspirational given that the station itself appeared to be a converted grain storage building with a folding table and an elderly man asleep in a lawn chair. He was wearing a hat that said DEER SEASON 2009 and his breathing was the relaxed, committed breathing of a man who was not going to be disturbed by any train that arrived on a normal schedule.

The station smelled like machine oil and something dusty and botanical she couldn't identify. There was a bulletin board near the door with laminated notices - hay for sale, a missing cat, the schedule for something called the Cedar Creek Harvest Market, which had apparently occurred in October. It was April. Someone had tacked a hand-lettered note over a corner of the bulletin board that said: If you're looking for the B&B, Jackie Crawford's on Maple Street, just past the feed store. She knows you're coming. Joanna did not think this note was for her. She did not think anyone in the state of Montana knew she was coming, including herself.